My students in HS EAL are a bright and creative group of young adults who work diligently every day to expand their minds in academic subjects, the arts, community service and in sports WHILE working to build their academic English. They bring with them a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and are all multi-lingual. They, and students like them, are our future! So, I am thrilled to set the stage for them to start thinking about innovation in new ways and to chart their own course for the project.
To ensure I stay on the sidelines and put the students in the driver seat, I've set up an Innovation Project notebook using OneNote to catalog and guide every step of the project. The online notebook includes an introduction to the project, a content library of resources that I can curate & edit as we go, a collaboration space we can all view & edit, and a personal page for each student which can only be seen by me. In the interest of student privacy, I have not made the whole notebook available here, but am happy to provide samples of notebook content if requested or answer any questions about how it's set up.
Prior to Week 1, students were introduced to the SDGs, were able to articulate their own understanding of what innovation is, and had a mini-lesson from me entitled "The Fourth Industrial Revolution," which ended with an invitation to spend the next four weeks taking charge of our classroom as we dive into Innovation Project 2018 together, but with students in the lead!
Coincidentally, I had chaperone duties for a MS excursion to Yangshuo during Week 1. This meant that I was hours away from my HS students, mostly in rural areas, and could only communicate with them via email or the notebook. Internet access was also sporadic on my end. The simultaneous launch of Innovation Project and our school's annual MS China Trips couldn't have been more perfectly timed, as I literally left the building and put the students in charge of their own learning. I look forward to letting them catch me up to speed in person on Monday.